The Trump administration is speaking with a strangely forked tongue, when it comes to Wikileaks.
On the one hand, we have Sarah Sanders saying that all of Trump's praise of Wikileaks during the 2016 election season was just one big joke, and that now the administration is taking the prosecution of Assange and Manning very seriously. Indeed, she says, the Trump administration is "the only one to do anything" about them.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/do...t-loving-wikileaks-sarah-sanders-says-n994296
Mike Pompeo, of course, has said that Wikileaks is a "non-state hostile intelligence agency."
Moon of Alabama thinks this is probably because of the amazing leak of the "Vault 7" files, "Marble Framework" and "Grasshopper", which are the CIA's presumably most advanced tools for computer hacking. This leak occurred in April 2017, and nobody questions that it was an "inside job" by some disgruntled CIA employee; although the alleged leaker,
Joshua Schulte, says he's been framed and it wasn't him.
So Assange is really good at getting leaks of inside information, with ongoing success, however he does it; and the Deep State wants it stopped.
Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani gave an exclusive interview to the Washington Examiner, hinting that perhaps Trump would lighten criminal charges against Assange, if he would give testimony to exonerate Trump in the Russiagate case, and expose a "plot" involving Ukraine.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/...ine-was-behind-false-russia-collusion-charges
Giuliani said Assange's apprehension — after nearly seven years in the embassy — could benefit the president, who was recently exonerated of criminal collusion with Russia by special counsel Robert Mueller.
"Maybe it will shed light on the plot to create an investigation of President Trump based on a false charge of conspiracy with the Russians to affect the 2016 elections. Keep your eye on Ukraine," Giuliani said. "It's possible with all his sources he might know or have information of how it all started."
Giuliani specified that he was talking about Assange exposing the origins of the federal investigation of possible Trump collusion with Russia and was not raising the possibility of Assange disproving that Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.
Giuliani said he believed Assange may be able to "show who invented [the] false story that [Trump] colluded with Russians."
I saw this story reported at Fort Russ, where they noted that this is an extremely limited hang-out on Giuliani's part, since he didn't mention that the DNC data was obtained by Wikileaks through a leak, not a hack.
https://www.fort-russ.com/2019/04/yuge-trumps-lawyer-to-wikileaks-assange-lets-make-a-deal/
Giuliani is a longtime deep state snake and what he is suggesting is negotiating a cover for CrowdStrike having laundered the CIA creation of supposedly Russian ‘fingerprints’ on the so-called ‘hack’ now proposed to be ‘outed’ as Ukrainian and bury the fact it was the assassinated Seth Rich took the DNC mails out on a memory stick. The price to be paid by Trump’s most farcical persecutors (e.g. John Brennan) is a little egg on the face over ‘bad intelligence’ that can be forgiven. A simple matter of embarrassment as it were. Meanwhile, wrapping up loose ends, a few expendable DoJ personalities will have to fall on their swords (Steele Dossier.)
Wikileaks knows the real score, and there is plenty of evidence in the public domain pointing to the reality but what remains to be seen is whether Wikileaks buys into Giuliani’s suggested lie to ‘rescue’ Assange (keeping the ‘hack’ narrative intact.) In other words it can never be admitted Central Intelligence Agency was behind the actual election meddling and attempted frame-up of a man who became President of the United States. This pitch to Wikileaks is likely agreed on terms between Trump’s Pentagon handlers (Pence faction), The Department of Justice and the intelligence agency big-shots. A peace treaty if you will.
Fort Russ themselves don't mention the possibility that this hack really was by Ukrainians, albeit affiliated with the Clinton campaign.